The statistically average traveller
One nerd’s quest to unearth the realities of solo backpacking, with ✨data✨
I quit my job in January 2024.
I was 28, stuck, and ready for a shake-up. That shake-up came in the form of a 3 month solo backpacking tour of Latin America.
I got very different responses to my plans. Friends in London where I’ve lived for the past 6 years were supportive. Solo backpacking is a common thing in Europe, many do it at 18 as a rite of passage to adulthood.
Friends and family from my home country of Malaysia responded very differently. At best, I got a “wow, you’re…brave” (derogatory). At worst, I got a multi-day argument where I was told repeatedly that I would be kidnapped by drug cartels.
While I knew that the concern from the Malaysians was grounded in care, I also knew that it was based on xenophobic ideas and a preference to travel in detached luxury.
However, I was convinced that backpacking solo to this part of the world would be an adventure of a lifetime. I would meet people and see things that I could never do in my safe corner of the world. I wanted to prove this, but I wanted to prove it with ✨ data ✨.
The traveller survey
I created a Google Form with 15 questions asking participants about their background and travel plans. Ultimately, I wanted to answer the question “who is the statistically average traveller?”. The responses would craft a general picture of the kind of person one would meet while travelling this part of the world.
Methodology
I didn’t want to collect data from any random person off the street, so I shared the form with any person I had a “significant” conversation with (the baseline was a five-minute conversation). The responses were anonymous, though I added a free-text section to add contact details if they wanted to stay in touch.
Biases
Selection bias weighed heavily on the data collected in this survey. I am a 28-year old asian woman living in Europe and travelling solo, and despite my best efforts I subconsciously gravitated towards similar people. Apart from that, my Spanish is minimal, so the language barrier was the ultimate discriminator. I stayed mostly in hostels where younger solo travellers congregate.
The impact of distinct biases will be discussed with each individual result.
Respondents
The survey received a total of 74 responses 🎉. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of how many people I sent it out to so I don’t have an idea of the completion rate.
One thing I noticed is that when I sent out the survey to people in pairs or groups, often only one person would fill it out. So, the distribution of the results are skewed and probably over-represented by solo-travellers.
Results: The Average Traveller
Time for some results! Commentary on the results are categorised and marked with the following emojis:
💡 — idea or insight
🌿 — anecdotal observation
🤔 — possible bias
📕 — story
Country of meeting
I visited five countries in total. Here is the split of total respondents by country where we met, compared against the amount of time I spent in that country.
💡 Bolivia has the highest people/time ratio. I spent half of my time there on a 10-people tour through the Uyuni salt flats to get to the northern Chilean deserts. Potential insight here: if you’re looking for company, join a multi-day excursion.
🤔 I believe that I met less people in Peru because I was travelling with friends (which made me more comfortable and less likely to approach people), and because it was the first stop of the trip so I felt quite shy!
🤔 Chile has the lowest people/time ratio, which is surprising. I met a lot of people while hiking the W Trek in Patagonia, so I think this is a data collection issue. Considering that I was sharing the survey with people who then had a 5-day trek with no signal ahead of them, the drop-off is not that surprising.
Country of origin
I was really surprised by this. The top two countries are the UK and the US, whereas I would have guessed the Netherlands. I met so many Dutch people. When I asked them why there were so many of them out here, they said “we are a rich and our country is boring.” Go figure.
🤔 Language bias plays a big part here. I communicated in English with all of the respondents (I met some Chinese people but they didn’t fill out the survey).
🤔 Similarity bias might play a big part in why the UK is so overrepresented. It is easier to have a conversation with people when you’re from the same city.
🤔 Asians were quite rare, as you can see from the responses. Whenever I met an asian person I would make an effort to say hi!
Locals vs Foreigners
This one made me quite sad. I was hoping to make more local friends, but it was quite difficult with my lack of Spanish.
💡 TLDR: if you travel like I did (i.e. in hostels and with basic Spanish), you’re mostly going to meet travellers.
💡 I made the most local friends in Mexico. The main driver is English is more widely spoken in Mexico, so I was able to make more connections (200 days of Duolingo later and my Spanish is still no bueno).
🌿 I observed that Mexicans did the most local travelling. Mexico was the only country where I would meet local people also travelling and staying in hostels. This is probably because Mexico has a relatively higher GDP, especially in the north of the country (I was in Southern/Eastern Mexico so it makes sense that they were also visiting), and the country is huge so there’s more to travel and see.
🤔 However, there’s definitely some people who are not represented here. For example, the Chilean doctor I met while hiking to Macchu Picchu who invited me to stay with her in Santiago and brought me to meet her family (big love Sophie💖💖), and the other Peruvians I met on a random night hanging out at an artist’s studio.
Gender
Most of the concerns I received from friends and family was around safety as a female traveller. I have always resented the idea of having to moderate my actions based on my gender, but I also recognised that there are different risks for different gender presentations — especially in countries that are heavily patriarchal, or have disproportionate or discriminatory gender rights.
But as the results showed — there was an exact even split of gender. While the survey results are skewed based on data collection issues, this reflects my anecdotal experience as well.
🤔 There is a possible unconscious bias here where I was more likely to approach other women. It might come down to social conditioning or psychological safety in a new environment, but it was not conscious.
Age
Unsurprisingly to me, the bulk of the responses were in the 20–40 range. I assumed that travel to more remote (i.e. not the big flashy cities like London, Tokyo, Paris etc) parts of the world would be taken by people who are young enough to be adventurous, but old enough to have the financial means and self-confidence. I wish I took more discrete age readings so I could figure out the median age.
🌿 The people that I met in the 50–60 age groups were usually on post-retirement trips.
📕 I met a British woman in her 70’s in a speedboat to Isla del Sol in Bolivia. She was at the start of a solo 7-month trip that she had been dreaming about for 4 years during Covid-19. She quit her job working at Lloyds bank where she had been for most of her life. When I asked her what her friends and family’s response was, she said “they all thought I was crazy”. Hope she’s having the time of her life!
📕 I also met a couple from Chennai, India who lived in the UK for many years before moving back to India to take care of their parents. This world tour was the start of them living life for themselves again after fulfilling their responsibilities, and had gone on incredible adventures like ice diving in Antartica. I hope that my parents will also seek adventure like this.
📕 The youngest people I met were 18-year olds from Bristol, England. We became friends while climbing up Volcan de Fuego in Guatemala. They were so mature and really cool people, which both shocked and impressed me. If you dropped me in Guatemala at 18 I think I would have freaked out and stayed in fetal position for most of it. One positive thing about European culture is that parents encourage their children to be independent from a young age, and they tend to have a lot more self-confidence and be more worldy as a result.
However, this distribution changes significantly when we split consider whether I met this person in South America (SA) or Central America (CA)
The dominant age group in South America was 30–40s whereas that same age group only represented 21.2% of the respondents in Central America. On the flip side, the most common age group in Central America was 18–25 at almost 50%, whereas the same age group only represented 20% of respondents in South America.
💡 South America is known to be more expensive than Central America, so it makes sense that older people with more money flock there.
💡 I spent most of my time in SA in hiking clothes, altitudes >4,500m, and in below 10 degree weather. Whereas in central america I was basically in a bikini the entire time. I think it’s safe to assume that people in their late twenties-thirties prefer hiking, whereas CA is catching the younger party crowd.
Work
One of the big questions I wanted to answer was — what kind of job gives someone the freedom to travel? Are these countries full of students or remote workers? Do some industries attract more adventurous people?
Upon closer inspection, the distribution varies wildly again between SA and CA. This might be a good time to note that it is not common to be travelling both South and Central America in one trip, especially not one as short as three months. So it makes sense that the distributions vary significantly across the two regions.
Most people were doing South America (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia) or Central America (Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Belize etc). I would recommend doing this instead of my unhinged route, which was decided from picking a list of places from other people’s travel stories and not doing enough research on the best routes to take. It meant a lot more flying (which is expensive and really bad for the environment), and I missed out an areas like Argentinian Patagonia.
But anyway, back to the graphs…
From the biggest industry group, students, we can see this was heavily skewed by respondents in Central America. The distribution is completely different in South America.
🌿 Central America is a hot spot for American and Canadian students, and is a pretty short flight away (you can get from Miami to Cancun in 1 hour and 45 minutes).
💡 The large number of techies in South America is reinforcing an existing stereotype — people in tech love to hike.
🤔 I would have probably met more people in tech if I wasn’t so allergic to digital nomad evangelists that ran amok in work/play hostels like Selina.
💡 I met a surprising amount of doctors while on the road. Many of them were on locum gigs that paid well and would take months off between jobs to travel.
I took a free text input for occupation and normalised it to the closest industry manually. So here is a cute word cloud to show you what people were actually saying. See if you can spot your job here
Typical travel habits
Now that we have a sense of the typical person you’d meet in South and Central America (or perhaps, the variety of people), let’s look at how and why these people were travelling. This section might help inform how to meet friends or travel companions, or inspire you to take the leap if you are in a similar position in life.
As this section focuses on travelling habits, data from locals were not collected.
Where was I meeting people?
One of my main concerns was: how the hell am I going to make any friends? I forced myself to accept that I might spend three months completely by myself, relying on phone calls home for any social support. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I met probably hundreds of people. Most of them were casual, fleeting occurrences which were beautiful in their own way, but I also made friends that I plan to keep in touch with and visit! I’ve even met up with a couple of them who are London based since I’ve been back.
So, if you are concerned about making connections, here were my top-three ways to meet people while travelling:
🥇 On a tour. A lot of the tours include long travel times. When you’re in the back of a collectivo at the start of a three hour journey, you tend to strike up conversation. It’s also a great chance to get travel inspiration for your next stop and link up for travel buddies.
🥈 By chance! I realise now this is a really garbage generic category, so it has a high surface area. When i combed through the respondents, the most of them were I met during hikes, in bars, and random places like train stations. Here, it does take some courage to go up to a stranger and strike up a conversation, but you’d be surprised by the reception — most people are looking to make friends too. And if they’re not, you’ll never see them again so bun’em.
🥉 In a hostel. Hostels are mostly filled with travellers who are often looking to make friends. I found that there’s usually one or two hostels in a city/town which is known for social events (like a full calendar with multiple activities or outings a day). Beware of party hostels though, the only experience I had in one started with shots at 9am and thumping music and slamming doors until 4 in the morning…
Some stories about the random entries…
📕 Hinge — I know this is the first thing you spotted.
I made a friend on Hinge and they were a riot. We went to a Hello Kitty market with the CFO of DHL SSA (a story for another time) and spent time in the beautiful beach town of Zipolite. Apps can be a fun way to meet people, and you can always make your intention of looking for travel buddies or friends very explicit (try Hinge or Bumble Friends for this, though it’s mostly Americans and Europeans on these platforms).
📕 On a truck — honestly, can’t remember who on earth this is! Goes to show that I sat in too many trucks, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.
📕 Facebook — One great resource that I tapped into is FB solo traveller groups. The one I loved the most was Host A Sister where you could advertise to host, ask to be hosted, or for casual hang-outs. I posted my rough itinerary and found a Czech gal who was basically doing the same stretch for 1.5 weeks and she was a really cool person.
📕 Muay Thai — I went to a couple of Muay Thai classes while I was travelling which was a lot of fun. Doing a sport is a great way to meet people with common interests. Body language here is more important than speaking the same language!
Who were people travelling with?
Again, solo traveller anxiety said: what is everyone else is travelling in a couple or with friends and I’m the only lonely loser and everyone points at me and laughs?
🤔 Lonely people like lonely people! As you can imagine, solo travellers are more receptive and proactive in meeting people, so it’s no surprise that I met mostly solo travellers.
Looking again at the SA/CA split we see a different distribution
💡 Much more even split across the 4 categories in South America compared to Central. Travelling with families and partners could correlate with the higher age group stat as well.
💡 Solo travelling dominates Central America. Again, I think this correlates with the younger ages in the region.
🌿 In CA, it felt like there was a well-worn travellers path. I would bump into people weeks after meeting them in another town and find that we took the same route, offset by a day or two. Maybe this makes it easier to undertake as a solo travelling excursion
Gender distribution for solo travellers
One of the most unexpected results was that I met more solo female-travellers than male-travellers.
🌿 I noticed that many male backpackers were travelling in groups of friends.
💡 One of the biggest objections I got before I went on this trip was that it was too dangerous to do solo travelling as a woman, and especially in Latin America (whatever the hell that means). So it was great to be in such good company.
📕 On the last week of my trip, I stayed in Tribu Hostel in Holbox, Mexico. I was in a 10-person female dorm and we made plans to explore the island together. The big gaggle of us walked the long length of the beach at high tide and watched the sunset while flamingos grazed on plankton 20 meters away. We ate fancy tacos and then went looking for a lagoon to see the bioluminescent plankton in the dark sky of a new moon. We were stumbling around in the dark when someone’s torch shined on a sign that said “crocodiles” and we all ran off screaming. We eventually found the secluded lagoon and spent the night swimming around in the faint blue glow before going back to the hostel in 4x4 trucks with tiny plankton lights on our sunburnt skin. Pure magic.
Length of travel
Before this adventure, I had never taken a trip that lasted more than a week. I knew that this trip had to be at least 2 months because it was expensive and difficult to get to Latin America for me, and because there was so much nature and culture in the area that I wanted to explore, that just getting a taste of it would be too torturous.
I wanted to see if people had the same idea, or if some were treating it as a short place to spend annual leave.
What I got back was a wide range of answers, with as many people doing short <2 week trips as there were doing longer multi-month trips. It is awesome though, that a quarter of the respondents were doing extended trips of 3 months or more!
📕 I met a lovely American couple who quit their corporate jobs to do a massive world tour. Think they were doing a few months in SA, then to South East Asia.
Most people were only visiting one country, though though 1/3 were doing four countries or more.
Travel motivation
My motivations for taking this trip was primarily as a career break. I asked the respondents to categorise what kind of trip they were on as I was curious to see whether I’d be in good company with other people having a quarter-life crisis.
The top two categories were people on a career break and people on their “normal” vacations, i.e. taking time from their annual leave. I also met people who were career travellers and making their way across the continent by volunteering at hostels. There were also many people who came on this trip before starting their next educational step, or after graduation.
📕 One of my favourite people I met was this Chinese-American girl called Irene. She was this super high-achieving career gal who worked in US intelligence and then a biomedical company before she got made redundant. It was a huge leap of faith and change of pace to go from that to basically showing up in Guatemala with zero plans, and an open mind to a different way of life. I have her on Instagram and I can see that she’s still out there living her best life. 加油!
I also had a free text question “Why did you decide to travel”. The responses were really lovely, and here’s a word cloud to get a general sense of what people were saying
In general, people wanted to explore the world, get out of their comfort zones, and take a break from work. I wish I could share all the responses here as they are quite heart-warming and inspiring, but I will list some of my favourite ones instead:
- FUCK IT! Wanted to go on an adventure before I settled down
- Always wanted to backpack park during fall foliage
- Why not :)
- because I was exited to see the beauty of the earth and to meet people from other cultures
- I got laid off my job… and, we only have the present!!
- anted to explore the world and have time to put myself first after years of working
And my all time favourite one:
- better than England
Satisfaction
Going on a big trip like this is scary. What’s even scarier is that you might regret it. I asked people how the trip was comparing to their expectations.
Amazingly, not a single respondent said that it was below expectations! Though a few cautious ones said it was too soon to tell.
If that isn’t enough to motivate you to go on that trip — what else will?
🤔 If someone was having a really shit time, would that make them more or less likely to fill this out? Can’t tell whether it would make you more likely cause you want to vent or complain, or less likely cause you’re miserable and can’t be arsed.
Beyond statistics
The answer to my initial question — “who is the statistically average traveller” is unsurprising. A European or North American in their 20–40s, working a relatively high paying job.
But statistics don’t always reflect the full lived experience. What sticks with me to this day is the sheer diversity of people I met. I found myself discussing the right habitats for otters with an guy from Washington who just finished a salmon fishing season; having late night debates with an Israeli who’d just finished military training about the ongoing genocide in Palestine; and in the most crazy of situations, sharing some Bakwa with a group of Malaysian ladies in the most remote parts of Patagonia, brought all the way from my hometown Kuala Lumpur. In true Malaysian fashion, we realised that we lived five minutes away from each other, and that one of them used to work with my father.
My main takeaway is: there is no wrong reason or time in your life to go and take that crazy trip. And, if you’re the similar kind of nutter as I am, do it alone and with nothing but a backpack. You will be surprised that, despite differences in nationality or job or even stage of life, how many people are on a very similar journey to you.
